Spore

I delayed playing this game for so long not because I thought it would be bad, but because I feared it might actually live up to its grandiose aspirations. The whole PC god game/strategy/simulation style of gaming usually gets me into a lot of trouble. I sit down to play a few turns of Civilization and then barely manage to pull myself away sixteen hours later because my weak human body requires food and water on occasion. It got so bad I had to force myself to quit playing that one, and they don't make a patch for that. From the beginning, Spore looked to be right up my alley, so I hesitated. But I can only resist something like that for so long.

Creator Will Wright's previous work is in the same general category as a lot of other games I enjoy, but I was never really sucked in by any of it. I have always been terrible at SimCity. My population centers were so mismanaged they ended up looking like faithful re-imaginings of The Wire viewed from some sort of dirigible. I do appreciate a game that assumes I'm not an idiot, but I'm a little too obsessive-compulsive for that much micromanagement. I simply cannot deal with the ubiquitous background noise of guilt about a housing block without adequate fire safety or an increasing pollution issue or one of the million other things I'm doing wrong. Naturally, I run out of money trying to keep everyone happy and have to squeeze the poor residents to fill my coffers (there are only about four people not living in squalor at this point). This makes me feel even worse. Eventually, I remember that it's a game and I should be having fun, and I go do something else.

Wright's other major title, The Sims, is a game that is really impressive in a pointless sort of way. You can take it at face value, but then you're essentially just playing Normal Life: The Game. You can instead do what everyone else does, which is to assume the persona of an evil god with powers oddly limited by the family's bank account, and set about ruining these digital beings' lives. This is immeasurably more satisfying than unleashing catastrophes to punish your lazy citizens in SimCity. They're not much more than dots. In The Sims, you can be as sadistic as the game will let you, and it is surprisingly accommodating. I know this was not what Wright had intended, but what did he expect from a market so saturated in testosterone?

However, it turns out there is an upper limit to the enjoyment which can be derived from utterly destroying Mortimer Goth's life by, I don't know, driving his wife into the arms of the neighborhood bachelor, forcing social services to take his daughter away, turning his home into a fetid nightmare covered in rotting food, and selling any useful appliances until he cries himself to sleep every night in the middle of the road, face-down in a puddle of his own urine. What's cool is that the game is so well-equipped that such nonsense is possible. The building and editing tools are both powerful and intuitive. I have always felt the series is to be commended for that, even if the subject matter is somewhat vanilla.

Spore, I think, was intended to be the ultimate god game; a simulation in five distinct chapters representing steps on the path of life from single-celled organism to space-faring civilization. It is built upon the Maxis tradition that video games can be about creation and management, not just running, jumping, and murder. It also takes considerable inspiration from other sorts of games which share little besides a common camera angle. The game has a real-time strategy section and Sid Meier's Civilization series is clearly the foundation for the entire later portion. The creature phase, on the other hand, reminded me of that old SNES game EVO. I loved that game.

The player's responsibilities and goals change considerably as their species and culture becomes more complex . Each of Spore's eras is essentially a different game, although after your first run through, you are free to skip ahead. You must, however, deny yourself access to powers earned for completing the earlier segments.

The cell stage is a relatively simple 2D combat game in which your tiny organism must swim about in the tide pool and find food. Along the way, you'll pick up new body parts, mostly defense or mobility-related, and apply them to your body by mating, thus giving birth to the next, more advanced generation. I have to admit, I didn't expect much from this part, but it's constructed very well. Every part has a function, but they don't just add to your creature's statistics, the positioning and application has a lot to do with their utility. It's rather complex, and I expected it would just be something I'd rush through on my way to the creature phase they're so very proud of. Eventually, as you eat algae and/or other simple creatures, your species grows a tiny brain and climbs up out of the water. A little too soon, in my opinion. This phase could have been twice as long.

You've probably seen at least one preview of the creature stage. It was the game's biggest selling point, something they started showing off years before they even had an expected release date.

To be perfectly honest, this phase was painful to experience.

The design tool is impressive. No, to be fair, it's an incredible achievement. I created a gaggle of ridiculous animals, but no matter what I did, it managed to convincingly animate the poor things. That is why it's such a shame that the actual gameplay is so boring. I was expecting something dynamic, a unique ecosystem every game. What I got was each species huddled around their own little nest waiting for my creature to show up and either entertain or devour them. I would have liked to have a little more direct control over my creatures' movements, but I accept that may have been a necessary sacrifice if the builder was going to work properly. However, there is no excuse for how static the world is. They've had much of this in place for years now. I know. I saw the videos. It just seems like they finished the creature builder and then knocked off to go have a cold one instead of thinking about the application. It's stifled and repetitive and no one seemed to notice. I'm not expecting some outlandishly complex functioning ecology. The simple, cutesy aesthetic gives them considerable latitude, but I don't get the feeling they were even trying to make it interesting. It's sloppy.

Eventually you sing and dance or kill and eat your way to to sentience. Your creatures discover fire and tools, they get together and form a small tribe. The goal here is to establish your tribe as the dominant culture in the region. You can do this by giving the other tribes gifts and playing music for them until they become your ally. You can also steal their food, kill their warriors, and raze their village. As with the creature phase, you can tailor your strategy to suit the situation, make nice with the axe-wielding berserkers and slaughter the peaceful musicians. When you make the jump from creature to tribe, your choices don't affect too much. It grants your culture access to different powers, but friendly herbivores are perfectly able to take up arms and conquer their neighbors as a tribe. However, the results of the tribal phase determine a lot about your first city in the subsequent one and the game is pretty picky about whether or not you were opportunistic enough to qualify for the middle ground award. The tribal phase is adequate, if simple.

The civilization phase is a mess. Maybe I'm spoiled by my years of playing Meier's series, but Spore's take is so horribly managed I almost quit playing before I got to space.

Okay, that's a lie. Skipping the space phase was never on the table for me, but still.

I thought the idea was for the gameplay itself to become more advanced as the player's species grew in intelligence and complexity. The reality is just tedium. It's like Civilization with all the good stuff like city management and technological advancement cut out, leaving only the grind and repetition. What scant variation this era offers isn't available unless you conquer the right cities. I think it would have been a better idea to allow military, cultural, and economic vehicles from the start, and instead add another layer of strategy based upon which category your cities are in. Instead, you have exactly as many tactics available as you have different cities, with a maximum of three.

It gets worse. Despite the severely limited complexity, it still manages to bungle the presentation of the information you need with an over-burdened clusterfuck of a heads-up display. Bright blue and white flashing buttons clutter the screen at all times. It's as if they'd heard of strategy games, but had never actually seen one in action. Before I played Spore, I was worried they would simply rip off Civilization, and now I wish they had.

Finally, it's time to go into space. After you establish your world government based on religion, greed, or bloodshed, your society will be ready to spread their disgust for others throughout the galaxy. You'll first design a spaceship using essentially the same builder tool you used to create your creatures, and it's still very good. You also used it to clothe them in the tribal phase and design buildings and vehicles in the civilization phase, but you almost never see any of that in action and it comes off as just a periodic reminder that even though you're not always having fun, the game is not without its accomplishments.

This is where things finally get interesting. The game gives you the freedom to fly around and visit other stars. A successful space empire uses all the different societal tools. You can focus on colonization and trade, or you can fight and conquer. There is also a terra-forming game wherein you settle alien worlds, give them atmosphere, and create a functioning ecosystem. This makes your colonies larger and more profitable. It is sort of fun but it suffers from issues similar to those of the creature phase. It's rigid. Everything plays out according to some simple gauges. If the planet has room for only one predator, placing another will cause the newcomers to die off. They should at least fight it out, right?

The chief success of the space phase, and one of the big strengths of the game as a whole is how tactile it all is. They really did a marvelous job with the builder program. There is considerable depth to it, and yet someone with little experience with gaming in general can learn how to use it in minutes.

There is a similar philosophy at work in the control mechanism of the space phase. It feels very hands-on because it takes the floating third-person view Spore shares with all the games that inspired it and attaches the player's avatar, the ship they created. Every weapon and tool is a piece of equipment on board. It pulls the player into the action in a way that I've never seen in a strategy or simulation.

There is a catch, of course. The final phase of the game involves many details which require quite a lot of attention. This is good to a certain extent, but I wish the player's increasing level of technology opened up some optional tools to help streamline and automate some of the more tedious aspects of managing a space empire.

It's not easy to put all that together. Spore is an ambitious project that overextended itself a bit. At some points I was really impressed with what they have achieved, while just as often I was furious at those segments which felt rushed or incomplete.

Should you play Spore? The short answer is yes. It is equal parts groundbreaking and derivative, visceral and monotonous, but there is nothing quite like it. I feel comfortable recommending it for the sheer spectacle, but I don't think they got it quite right yet. This is probably good. I don't know if I would have been able to stop playing long enough to write this if they had.

It's hard to have faith in this industry sometimes. If these companies spent more time designing than on marketing and hype, we could really start elevating gaming as an art form. I have even less faith in EA, but I always thought Wright and his people were really interested in pushing the limits of electronic entertainment and I still do. Spore isn't bad, it's just incomplete.

It's an awkward lurch in the right direction.